Defining dreams in a Maidenform bra

Company's new ad campaign aims for emotional connection with women to market what it bills as a technological wonder.

October 05, 2005|By Claudia H. Deutsch, Ne`w York Times News Service.

Maidenform ladies are dreaming again.

Many of those too young to remember probably know about the ad campaign that Maidenform ran from the end of World War II up through the mid-1960s. It was the one with gorgeous ladies, their bottoms modestly clad but their tops ensconced only in their bras, dreaming they "went shopping"--or rode fire trucks, or crossed the Nile on Cleopatra's barge--"in their Maidenform bras."

It was shockingly risque for the time--Mad Magazine spoofed the campaign in 1962, with "I dreamed I was arrested for indecent exposure in my Maidenform bra." But it sure sold a lot of undergarments.

Well, the dream around Maidenform's Bayonne, N.J., headquarters is that women will happily pay $32--a relatively high price for Maidenform--for the "Dream Bra" the company has introduced. The company insists it is a technological wonder--fuzzy lining on the cups, flexible underwires, cloth-encased elastic, softer hooks and straps, all kinds of things aimed at comfort and fit. And it insists its research shows that high on the list of women's dreams is an ample supply of comfortable bras that really fit.

But you won't pick any of that up from the three-part billboard that since Sept. 21 has towered over the southwest corner of 35th Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan--right across the street from Macy's, one of Maidenform's major channels.

It sports a beautiful young woman, shown from the waist up, wearing nothing but a bra. The ad copy is equally spare: "Introducing the dream bra."

But while the words say little, the model's look speaks volumes: She manages to be sultry and innocent and, well, dreamy.

"Maidenform has always had this emotional connection with women, an understanding of their aspirations, and that is what we are stressing now," said Elizabeth Morris, Maidenform's vice president for marketing.

For Maidenform, it is a repeat of history even beyond the retro-chic ad campaign. The company was founded during the flapper era of the 1920s, on the then-radical premise that women who were routinely binding and flattening their breasts would really rather have them lifted and contoured.

Its founders were right: Women bought bras in droves, and the company took off.

As the role of women changed through the years, so did Maidenform's marketing approach. The "I dreamed" campaign showed women looking sexy as they did girly-type things like shopping. Then the '60s and '70s happened, and women's aspirations went beyond getting lascivious looks and nice allowances from their husbands.

"The new female mantra was, I don't have to just dream about it, I can do it," said Norah D. Alberto, a senior marketing manager. For Maidenform, that meant a new tag line--"The Maidenform Woman: You never know where she'll turn up"--and new roles for its bra-clad model. She was a judge, she was a professional cellist, she was much more than a sexy wife and shopper.

By the 1990s, a bunch of ads came along emphasizing comfort and fit.

But by 1997, everything went dark. Maidenform, like so many U.S. apparel manufacturers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It emerged from bankruptcy in 1999, and began shifting its manufacturing operations to contractors overseas. This year, after several years of losses, Maidenform began earning money again. In July, the company went public, raising some $217 million.

So finally, it can again spare some dollars for image-sprucing. And that is good news for Laspata/DeCaro, the small agency it hired in 2002 to "make the Maidenform image relevant to today's woman," as Charles DeCaro, the agency's creative director, put it. The agency's paradoxical answer to giving Maidenform a 21st Century spin: resurrect the old image of the dream.

But if the idea is retro, the dreams--and dreamers--are anything but. The model group includes races other than white. And the ads themselves seem to take as a given that women can succeed professionally, and instead play with what they may be dreaming about when they are not working.

In one ad, a woman holds a baby, who, the implication is, she tried hard to conceive. The tagline: "Dreams do come true." Another shows a young couple on a beach, with the line, "I dreamed every day was Sunday." And some have a touch of the implied risque--"Some dreams are best unspoken."

Marketing experts say Maidenform is onto something. "They know that today's woman is empowered, so they are letting her define her own dreams," said Michael Watras, president of Straightline International, a New York brand consultancy.

"And they are playing to a wider audience than is, say, Victoria's Secret," he added. "They are acknowledging that every woman, whether she wants to be a CEO or a mom or a girlfriend or all three, has dreams and wears a bra."

The new campaign involves billboards; direct mail; full-page ads in magazines including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Oprah, Cosmopolitan and Elle, and probably a spate of newspaper ads bought in conjunction with retailers.

None of the models look older than 35, but the ads are aimed at a much wider age group. "Haircuts and dresses may be age specific," said Rocco Laspata, the other half of Laspata/DeCaro, "but women just don't worry that their bra is inappropriate for their age."